A petition surely won't make Lego question their decision (we know how it went with the 42113 Osprey, where the petition had over 4000 subscribers).

The main curse of the C+/PU-System right now is the controllability/accessability in contrast to PF. What really will help is the release of the dumb battery box, which will come in future models and was already planned in the 42113.

I am not sure, if they ever release a handheld controller. This thing would also have to be connected to the internet or the app so it can use presets for the models.

I think one of the most disappointing things about the new PU system is the lack of compatibility.  The fact that Technic has changed so much over the years, and yet is still completely compatible with the stuff I had 30 years ago is impressive.  The fact that I can't use any of my old PF motors or LEDs with PU, even in a "dumb" mode, is not.  With the previous switch from old 9V to PF, there was the ingenious solution of putting an old 9V connector on the underside of one end of the extension cable.  Even if the hubs just had a single PF output on them it would open up more possibilities.   Cheap adapter cables would be even better.

I also think that 4 channels on a massive, non-rechargeable battery box is pretty underwhelming, particularly as you can't double up motors on a single channel.

Given they broke compatibility, TLG could have knocked it out of the park with PU, with 6 or 8 channels and LiPi/LiIon rechargeables in something the size of the AAA battery box.  Better still, properly smart devices on a bus-style system where you don't have to wire everything back to the hub.

I guess with the trend for huge models, using two hubs to get 8 channels isn't a problem for the official sets.

What I dislike about the new technic sets is how many of them use PU.

Before a lot of sets did not have any motors but could be "upgraded" with 8293.

 

I like my Lego without any technology in them, so really annoying I cannot buy some sets without having extra motors I do not want to use :/

 

Back on topic: I think a petition for a converter to go from the PF battery box to the new USB-like format would have more success. Is there already a 3th-party converter in the making?

This quite interesting... not the petition idea, that won't achieve anything, nor should it ..but there is on balance more support for C+/PU than PF. A few months ago it had very few (vocal) supporters. PU will only grow and get more flexible and stable, its scope is a 1000 times greater than PF.

Just move on.. PF is dead. PU is the now and the future. As mentioned by @kbalage this isn't a knee jerk decision, its many years of planning. There is zero chance of TLG even considering keeping obsolete control systems... use your energy to embrace change!! Its not all bad, you might be surprised 

(ps No more petrol cars after 2030...  )

PU needs to be more mature and accessible on the software side, there's still room for improvement there. A simple and clean interface besides the advanced coding options and documentation is a must.

The hardware is already very capable, yes I know there's no connector stacking but that was a sacrifice to make for the interactive motors and sensors. If anyone wants to run PF motors with the PU hubs then a converter cable is quite easy to make, or you can buy pre-made converters, extension cables, USB adapters and pretty much everything from 3rd parties.

One additional thought - TLG will never produce again buggy motors or anything similar strong/fast solutions, so there's no point of complaining about it. But there are plenty of 3rd party solutions to look at so we have even more options than before.

2 hours ago, pdw said:

I think one of the most disappointing things about the new PU system is the lack of compatibility.  The fact that Technic has changed so much over the years, and yet is still completely compatible with the stuff I had 30 years ago is impressive.  The fact that I can't use any of my old PF motors or LEDs with PU, even in a "dumb" mode, is not.  With the previous switch from old 9V to PF, there was the ingenious solution of putting an old 9V connector on the underside of one end of the extension cable.  Even if the hubs just had a single PF output on them it would open up more possibilities.   Cheap adapter cables would be even better.

I also think that 4 channels on a massive, non-rechargeable battery box is pretty underwhelming, particularly as you can't double up motors on a single channel.

Given they broke compatibility, TLG could have knocked it out of the park with PU, with 6 or 8 channels and LiPi/LiIon rechargeables in something the size of the AAA battery box.  Better still, properly smart devices on a bus-style system where you don't have to wire everything back to the hub.

I guess with the trend for huge models, using two hubs to get 8 channels isn't a problem for the official sets.

New Mindstorms hub has 6 ports and you can do with it everything you could with PU hub. Even it's size is practically the same as PF battery box, but with more and better connection points and you can also recharge it with USB cable, no need to remove it for battery changes. It's expensive though.

7 hours ago, kbalage said:

..yes I know there's no connector stacking but that was a sacrifice to make for the interactive motors and sensors. If anyone wants to run PF motors with the PU hubs then a converter cable is quite easy to make, or you can buy pre-made converters, extension cables, USB adapters and pretty much everything from 3rd parties.

I'm sorry but this just isn't true. It was a deliberate decision. There are more then one protocols that could have been implemented, even free ones, they just chose not to do it. Wifi and ethernet could have upped the price, but what about USB? How come USB hubs work? USB mice are cheaper than lego motors. I come from industry so I also know a few old ones that still run powerplants and are open now so they could have run my lego.. It is not like you need the 1ms response..

 

The other part. Is this normal? Like you said, PU was planned for years. They had the time and all the freedom how to do it. And still, third party products are the ones we want to buy??? It would be normal for lego to go out with all the stuff, with higher price, and the the 3rd party companies to catch up a year or two after, and now - even you connecting cables at home are ahead of lego? Really? 

 

And the Powered Up app.. I uninstalled it because it was useless, until I saw your instructions. And you are just one guy doing other stuff for 99% of the time. Does that say enough?

 

@chekitch I did not say the implementation of PU happened the best way possible, but a custom connector is a logical solution in a system designed for kids. I'm sure you wouldn't want to be able to connect a motor directly to a USB adapter or a power source to the output of a hub. TLG developed this connector for WeDo 2.0, and then they decided to go with it for the whole system. I'm actually quite happy to see now the exact same connector in all product ranges. And don't forget TLG is a multinational company, and as such it is terribly slow with the product development cycle. Small independent companies are much more agile and they can react quickly to the demand of customers. PV productions can release an adapter with a 3d printed case, but this wouldn't work with LEGO.

Last year I talked to the hardware dev guys responsible for PU, and we discussed the adapter as well. A simple adapter (like the one I linked above) is cheap, but it cannot handle e.g. the Servo motor or the WeDo 1.0 sensors with PF plugs. It might be acceptable from a 3rd party product for AFOLs, but not from LEGO. So they would need to make a smarter adapter, but then it'd be more expensive and people would complain about that. There's no easy solution for proper backwards compatibility. 

I was also very vocal about the lack of a complete product range as a replacement of the PF ecosystem when it was released. But the sad truth is that the focus (and the money) is on the sets and not on the custom builds, and the PU-equipped sets offer a solution out of the box with the Control+ app. I'm sure we will see more things coming on the customization side, but the development is slow I agree, much slower than it supposed to be. But this does not mean that the whole concept of Powered Up is wrong and Power Functions should stay here forever. If anyone prefers to use Power Functions they are totally free to do it, not having the ability to buy things directly from LEGO does not change anything. We can complain about the system all day or actually start to use it where it shows its benefits.

9 hours ago, pdw said:

I think one of the most disappointing things about the new PU system is the lack of compatibility.  The fact that Technic has changed so much over the years, and yet is still completely compatible with the stuff I had 30 years ago is impressive.  The fact that I can't use any of my old PF motors or LEDs with PU, even in a "dumb" mode, is not.  With the previous switch from old 9V to PF, there was the ingenious solution of putting an old 9V connector on the underside of one end of the extension cable.  Even if the hubs just had a single PF output on them it would open up more possibilities.   Cheap adapter cables would be even better.

I also think that 4 channels on a massive, non-rechargeable battery box is pretty underwhelming, particularly as you can't double up motors on a single channel.

Given they broke compatibility, TLG could have knocked it out of the park with PU, with 6 or 8 channels and LiPi/LiIon rechargeables in something the size of the AAA battery box.  Better still, properly smart devices on a bus-style system where you don't have to wire everything back to the hub.

I guess with the trend for huge models, using two hubs to get 8 channels isn't a problem for the official sets.

So, basically you want TLG to make their own Buwizz 3?

There are alternatives available for PF motors. Bluebrixx recently started sell their own line of PF compatible motors. Buwizz is kind of resurrecting the buggy motor.
I think there is no need to worry that we will run into supply issues regarding motors.

One should also note that PU is still quite a new system and hopefully it's going to receive a lot of development in the future.

I'm not entirely sure how the stackable connectors of PF even help with the limitations in practice. Sure, you can connect huge number of motors into the battery box, but you can't run them all due to the capabilities of the power supply. I guess you could have a need for many motors where only one or few are running at any given time, but that would still imply a huge build, where adding another battery box would probably not be big a problem anyway. And how many people (even among AFOLs) are ever going to build any such thing? As kbalage said above, TLG's focus is on selling sets (mainly for kids, too) and the new system has been designed with that in mind, the dozen-motor-huge-MOC-builders are a really small segment of all TLG's customers.

Between PF (which will be around for years to come), third party devices (of which there are many) and PU/Mindstorms (which will get more features in the future), builders have much wider selection of options on making motorized MOCs than ever before, you could even combine the different systems mechanically. I really see no reason to worry.

Though legitimate cases where you would use more than 4 motors on a PF battery box are probably rare, this is different for lights. However, I think that's better served with a light-specific solution.

they should just use a normal programing language like python or java script 

6 hours ago, MY1 said:

they should just use a normal programing language like python or java script 

That would not make sense for a system that supposed to be useable for kids without much coding experience. The current solution should be simplified, not made more complicated.

Pybricks is there if you want to use Python with the PU hubs, or the Mindstorms hub comes with native support and the same connectors.

11 hours ago, pleegwat said:

Though legitimate cases where you would use more than 4 motors on a PF battery box are probably rare, this is different for lights. However, I think that's better served with a light-specific solution.

Yeah, some kind of extensible solution for lights would be nice. Adding many lights with the PF solution of course would require towers of stacked connectors, though you could conceivably divide them with extension cables. PU lights are principally the same, except without connector stacking so each pair of lights eats one port from the hub, so for anything more heavy on functions you'll end up having to choose between motors and lights. Two motors could be used in conjunction with a gearbox to drive 4 functions and that would leave enough connectors for 2 pairs of lights with the C+ hub, which isn't all that much...

If they designed the lights in a similar way to wireless headphones with a mini rechargeable battery or own wired power circuit and a separate bluetooth (or other)connection, would they even need to be wired back to the hub?

14 hours ago, Jimrask said:

So, basically you want TLG to make their own Buwizz 3?

Well it seems they've left a gap in the market  In this day and age, a massive 6 x AA battery box seems very old fashioned and inconvenient.  

12 hours ago, pleegwat said:

Though legitimate cases where you would use more than 4 motors on a PF battery box are probably rare, this is different for lights. 

Actually, there's lots of things I can think of that need 5.  Mobile machinery is always popular (cranes, lifters, telehandlers, etc.) and once you've used two channels to make it move, two channels for other functions is quite limiting.  

I do think that it's a shame that given that they've made an uncharacteristic break with backwards compatibility, they didn't go for a more ambitious bus-style system that would allow far more channels, as it opens up more interesting possibilities for lights and sensors.

TLG's focus may be on the sets, but as a parent, one of the reasons I'm always happy to buy Lego for my children is because I know it can and will be built into other things, so the flexibility to be able to do more with it is very important.

58 minutes ago, pdw said:

Well it seems they've left a gap in the market  In this day and age, a massive 6 x AA battery box seems very old fashioned and inconvenient.  

Actually, there's lots of things I can think of that need 5.  Mobile machinery is always popular (cranes, lifters, telehandlers, etc.) and once you've used two channels to make it move, two channels for other functions is quite limiting.  

I do think that it's a shame that given that they've made an uncharacteristic break with backwards compatibility, they didn't go for a more ambitious bus-style system that would allow far more channels, as it opens up more interesting possibilities for lights and sensors.

TLG's focus may be on the sets, but as a parent, one of the reasons I'm always happy to buy Lego for my children is because I know it can and will be built into other things, so the flexibility to be able to do more with it is very important.

I'm guessing the main reason why C+ hub still has AA-batteries is the fact that shipping Li-ion batteries is massively painful in large scale. It's a tradeoff between user convenience and the additional cost in logistics.

As I said earlier, the Mindstorms hub solves most of these issues with 6 ports, internal sensors and rechargeable battery. Of course it's still bigger than Buwizz, but if you already have 5-6 motors and the support structures for them and their functions, the size starts to become a non-issue. I'm using it for my excavator build, and all the problems so far have been mechanical, I haven't updated the topic but I recently tested the functions and mostly they worked fine, except for the boom twisting (also some of the gearing was off the mark so I'm going to rebuild those).

 

Since I've managed to PF-convert 42114, I intend to do the same to the remaining C+ models. Is that a wise thing to do? I do enjoy very much the immediacy and tactility of the good ole PF IR controller. 

The C+/PU have an encoder and that is, for me, alone a justification for their existence.

I get that you don't need an encoder all the time, that PF is widely available but you can't indefinitely keep backward compatibility, at one point it hinders innovation.

For someone wanting to learn (STEM is here the main market), you need an encoder to teach about PID, sensors, stalled torque etc. and just keeping that in a  (expensive) mindstorm kit is a shame, better to "democratize" the encoders to all electric motors. Just having a PF with an ON/OFF (unless you use Buwizz 2.0 with different voltages but that's not an official lego set) is not really future proof. Also bluetooth > IR, you can't blame them for wanting to modernize this, a lot of consumers would prefer to control their creation with a better range and on their phone.

Regarding the new hub, lot of ports which is great  and mostly it can do the job but my main problem..and this is why I'd chose the raspberry pi (in a homemade lego case)/PC + buwizz 3.0 combination is the processing powers and capabilities.

They could have went with a SPIKE hub for simple tasks (resource-wise) like micropython, scratch etc. and put a more powerful hub/OS in the mindstorms that would allow web-services, more advanced programs etc to run better, the current mindstorm hub has a 100Mhz CPU I believe, more powerful ARM CPU aren't that expensive to be honest, so the current hub is 'officially' stuck with micropython/scratch and no wifi.

I discovered mindstorms in engineering schools so they are used in advanced courses and a shame they did not upgrade it with more modern SoC that would be in phase with today's education : IoT, voice recognition, machine-learning, APIs, machine vision, sensor fusions...

 

As my Sonos is bricked until I upgrade my phone, my big issue with PU is future compatibility with devices. In 10 years time when Lego replace and stop supporting PU, how do you control it if the app won't work on the newest iOS or Andoid? Will bricklink be full of listings for iPhone 9's so you can run PU? Do I want to spend £400 on an excavator that I may not be able to use in a decade or so?

My PF IRs will always work.

16 minutes ago, Burko-uk said:

As my Sonos is bricked until I upgrade my phone, my big issue with PU is future compatibility with devices. In 10 years time when Lego replace and stop supporting PU, how do you control it if the app won't work on the newest iOS or Andoid? Will bricklink be full of listings for iPhone 9's so you can run PU? Do I want to spend £400 on an excavator that I may not be able to use in a decade or so?

My PF IRs will always work.

No they won't, or maybe the IR's will but the motors will wear out eventually and when they do, you'll have to source replacements that are cheap now but will become more expensive as the world supply runs thinner and thinner.

But I'm sure the third-party software will make it possible to control PU motors long after TLG has given up on them.

50 minutes ago, Burko-uk said:

As my Sonos is bricked until I upgrade my phone, my big issue with PU is future compatibility with devices. In 10 years time when Lego replace and stop supporting PU, how do you control it if the app won't work on the newest iOS or Andoid? Will bricklink be full of listings for iPhone 9's so you can run PU? Do I want to spend £400 on an excavator that I may not be able to use in a decade or so?

My PF IRs will always work.

Bluetooth is a standard protocol you already have third party apps to control your lego should lego stop the support on devices. I don't think we are surrounded with phones that have IR sensors should that IR remote break like your sonos (and it's not really premium quality), also I think you can use a bluetooth controller directly or indirectly in some cases rather than a phone.
As long as you have device that supports BLE (which is a safe bet) you should be fine.

Regarding the official application ,yes it is up to Lego, It's still compatible with devices iOS 10.0+ to this day which covers a lot of iPhones

Bluetooth is more future-proof than IR, it is found in nearly all phones/tablet you can buy in the last years.

Edited December 15, 20204 yr by sephiroth117

On 12/8/2020 at 9:35 AM, thic_trains said:

I have some sad news

news?

On 12/8/2020 at 11:11 PM, Jeroen Ottens said:

They just released a free programmable app. The PoweredUp app now has the MindStorms like programming interface 

Is it available for desktop, or for mobile only? If no desktop app, which mobile devices are supported then? Which iOS/Android versions? How convenient really is it, to program something on a touch screen? These are all rhetorical questions. Personally, I wouldn't hurry to label PU as "progress". Yes, it's a new corporate strategy, and PU is better for TLG for their reasons - it doesn't necessarily mean it's better for us, because we have our own reasons and definitions of "better", don't we?

8 hours ago, howitzer said:

No they won't, or maybe the IR's will but the motors will wear out eventually and when they do, you'll have to source replacements that are cheap now but will become more expensive as the world supply runs thinner and thinner.

But I'm sure the third-party software will make it possible to control PU motors long after TLG has given up on them.

This fate awaits PU motors as well. But they will cost even more than PF, as they already do.

And how "third-party software" will get paid for their labor? The software side also worries me, tbh. TLG is not a software company, they are a toy company. I mean, C+'s APK was, like, 500Ms lol - I hope they fixed that now. Will they have enough resources and knowledge to maintain their software? Yes, they had Mindstorms, and pretty successfully, but they seem to be greatly expanding their software scale with PU. All the firmware for the smart hubs... And it's likely the mobile apps will need constant maintenance. I'm really curious to see how PU pans out.